* NEWS COMMENTARY FOR JUNE 2016: On 26 June, a senior Iraqi military
commander announced that the city of Fallujah had been recaptured from
Islamic State (IS) insurgents, as a consequence of an offensive that began on
22 May. Fallujah had been captured by the IS in early 2014, being the first
city to fall to the insurgents. Iraqi forces are now turning their attention
to the liberation of Mosul, Iraq's second-largest city.

The Fallujah operation was carried out by Iraq's elite counterterrorism
troops, Iraqi federal police, Anbar provincial police, and an umbrella group
of government-sanctioned militia fighters -- mostly Shiites -- who are known
as the "Popular Mobilization Forces". Tens of thousands of people from
Fallujah who were forced to flee their homes during the operation are still
at overcrowded camps in the Anbar desert. The US-led coalition said it was
still conducting airstrikes in the area, and aid groups warned it was too
early to say when residents could return to their homes in the city, IS
having left plenty of booby traps behind.

Clearing away the bombs could take anywhere from days to months. When
civilians initially returned to Ramadi after it was declared fully liberated
from IS in February, about 100 people were killed by booby traps.

Besides Mosul, IS still controls significant areas in northern and western
Iraq. The group, which swept across Syria and Iraq in the summer of 2014,
declared an Islamic caliphate on that territory. At the height of its power,
IS was believed to hold nearly a third of each country.

Exactly how the rest of the campaign will play out remains to be seen. Iraq
still remains beset by strife between Sunni and Shia, and it is not clear if
the government will be able to establish social order, or even order within
itself. Nonetheless, the liberation of Fallujah is encouraging -- and
incidentally also reflects well on US President Barack Obama, who has been
heavily criticized for "permitting" the rise of IS. The sniping is hard to
take seriously: given the chaos that is Iraq, could anyone credibly assert
they could do better?

* Somewhat surprisingly, the UK's vote on 23 June on whether to stay in the
European Union (EU) came out as LEAVE; the odds had been on REMAIN. The
British government has been effectively turned upside down and shaken out by
the "Brexit" vote; stock markets fell around the world. However, the wailing
over Brexit has come across as over-the-top; in six months or a year, things
will have settled out. On the optimistic view, Brexit may prove to have been
not much more than a temporary blip, if a big one, in the global order of
things.

There are fears that the EU may begin to crumble after Britain's departure --
but the British have traditionally set themselves off from Europe, as
demonstrated by the old joke headline: ENGLISH CHANNEL COVERED BY FOG,
CONTINENT ISOLATED. To an extent, the consensus of reaction, however
expressed under the breath, might well be: Good riddance, we weren't crazy
about you, either.

If the British experience after going it alone turns out poorly, the end
result will be a bad example that will strengthen the EU; if Britain, as
might be most optimistically assumed, simply accomplishes nothing much of
significance by Brexit -- the case for Brexit was marked by exaggerations
ranging into the ridiculous, so there's not much basis for thinking it will
do much good -- there will be no added incentive for other nations to leave
the EU as a result. Nonetheless, it is clear that not all is well with the
European Union, and the EU will go through a period of self-examination,
to hopefully be better off for the exercise.

The optimistic view still lends a depressing color to Brexit, for it doesn't
seem there was a substantial reason for Britain to step out, the decision
being driven by nationalist emotion. That suggests Brexit may be only the
first step in an assault on Britain's established political order. It is
understandable that citizens have grown weary of politicians and government
bureaucrats who persist in the same old business as usual; unfortunately,
that dissatisfaction seems manifested by a turn towards demagogues and
troglodytes who make the traditional leadership seem attractive in
comparison. This is effectively a global trend, and it's one that promises
to do much more harm than good.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, having strongly backed REMAIN,
immediately announced his resignation on learning of the LEAVE vote, having
been handed a stinging vote of NO CONFIDENCE. European Union leadership
insisted that Britain settle matters with the EU as soon as possible,
protesting against Cameron's decision to effectively toss the matter off to
the next government. However, Cameron had little choice in the matter;
re-establishing Britain's relationship with the rest of Europe promises to be
maddeningly difficult, and as he thought Brexit a bad idea, he wasn't in any
position to make decisions that would affect the following pro-Brexit
government.

Brexit leadership, having got what they wanted, are inevitably stuck with
having to deal with the consequences. This hardly an optimum situation,
since the Brexit camp seemed oblivious to how far-reaching the decision to
leave the EU was, and does not appear to have a real plan of what to do next.
EU leadership can complain to Cameron all they like, but that's all they can
do; there's nothing he can do, and it's not his problem any more.

* An item in BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK discussed the "Justice Against Sponsors
of Terrorism Act (JASTA)", which authorizes US courts to hear civil claims
for monetary damages against a foreign state accused of direct involvement in
a terrorist act that harmed American citizens in the US. Under current law,
foreign nations are immune from lawsuits in US courts. Although the specific
rationale of the bill wasn't described in its text, the intent is to allow
families of 9-11 victims to sue Saudi Arabia. JASTA was unanimously passed
by the US Senate on 17 May; President Obama has promised to veto it.

As appealing as JASTA might sound, at least to some, Obama would have very
good reason to veto it. International relations are the province of the
administration, not something traditionally, or for that matter very
usefully, delegated to the courts. If we have an issue with another country,
we have to work it out diplomatically; JASTA would short-circuit sensible
foreign relations, permitting private citizens to freeze the assets of
another country, which would make diplomacy incoherent.

Worse, JASTA would set a precedent that few senators would like. What would
happen if other countries decided to retaliate in kind? Countries such as
Cuba and Iran have made claims for billions of dollars against the US, and
JASTA would give them leverage to make more trouble over them. There's
always an attraction to overturn the rules for a temporary advantage; it
takes a little more foresight to realize that, after the rules have been
overturned, we have now handed adversaries a tool to be used against us, with
everyone worse off over the longer run.

* VIRTUAL REALITY AGAIN? As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST
("Grand Illusions", 29 August 2015), the notion of virtual reality (VR) -- in
which users operate in a computer-generated virtual environment -- is a
long-standing element of sci-fi stories. In the 1990s, several firms tried
to make it a reality. They failed; computers weren't powerful enough to
generate a convincing world; the headsets and other gear was bulky, heavy,
and too expensive; with users suffering from headaches and nausea. VR did
have some niche applications, but it hardly proved a popular revolution.

Now VR is back. Oculus of Menlo Park, California, is one of the leaders in
the revival effort. Palmer Luckey, the firm's founder, now in his early
twenties, got his hands on old VR headsets when he was a teenager, tinkering
with them in his parents' garage. Thinking he could do better, Luckey
hacked together his own VR headset, and in 2012 turned to Kickstarter, a
crowdfunding website, to raise money to get the gadget into production.

One of those who got interested was John Carmack, a well-known videogame and
graphics programmer; Carmack tweaked one of Luckey's headsets, to demonstrate
it at a gaming conference in 2012. Luckey's Kickstarter effort went into
overdrive; he dropped out of college to work on Oculus full-time, with
Carmack becoming chief technology officer. Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg bought
out Oculus for $2 billion USD in 2014, with the firm introducing its "Rift"
headset this year.

Other firms are getting into the VR market, in hopes of cashing in on what
they hope to be the next big consumer fad, with market research firms
estimating that VR will be a $30 billion USD a year business by 2020.
However, much was expected of VR in the 1990s, and it fizzled. Will things
work better this time around?

Advocates believe so, for the simple reason that the technology is so much
better. Part of the reason is more computing power and better software; but
at least as important are better displays, and better sensors to keep track
of what a user is doing.

VR headsets have two color LCD displays, one for each eye, which display
stereo images that provide an illusion of depth. The problem with the old
VR headsets was that they had relatively low resolution, meaning the imagery
wasn't all that convincing, and low video frame display rates, which led to
vertigo and nausea -- what became known as "VR sickness". The new generation
of VR headsets have from 2 to 2.6 megapixels, split between the two displays,
and frame rates of 90 to 120 frames per second. Even such high frame rates
can cause VR sickness; investigation has demonstrated that the transition
from frame to frame are part of the problem, with that problem largely
addressed by inserting a black frame for two milliseconds between each video
frame change.

New organic-light-emitting-diode (OLED) displays have proven very useful for
VR headsets. OLED displays have high resolution, can be updated rapidly, can
be made small and light enough for use in headsets, and are cheap enough for
a consumer product. However, a VR headset also has to track the position of
user's head, so the imagery can be shifted around appropriately. Headsets
use a set of cameras, and the miniaturized gyroscopes and accelerometers
found in smartphones, to keep track of a user's movements.

The sensors have to take measurements hundreds of times a second, reporting
them back immediately, with the VR image then updated immediately in return.
The slightest delay can cause VR sickness. Inadequate sensor systems was one
of the problems that crippled the first generation of VR; adequate sensor
systems weren't available until recently. They weren't available
off-the-shelf, either; VR pioneers had to ask for them to be built. VR
sensors not only track the movement of the head, but also of the hands, and
the motion of the user through the surroundings.

A well-made VR program creates a convincing immersive world, of actually
being inside an alternate reality. This is new territory, and those
developing such programs are still trying to figure out how to build such
alternate realities. Tricks from TV and video gaming don't necessarily
work very well for VR. For example, cutting from scene to scene, as per a TV
show, is disorienting in VR. In a video game, an explosion will cause an
image to shake, but in VR it can result in VR sickness, since the user
doesn't feel the vibration as well.

Initial VR product offerings are being targeted at gamers, who are always
after the latest technology, and are inclined to experimentation. There is
also tinkering with immersive videos, made with panoramic cameras, that place
the viewer in the center of the action. VR headsets could make cramped
economy flights on an airliner much more tolerable. And then there's
pornography, though nothing more will be said about that here. Beyond that,
the opportunities are open-ended: interactive social media, education,
collaborative work environments, and applications not yet dreamed of.

The problem is that none of this is for real yet, and the possibility remains
of a VR fizzle. Bugs still have to be worked out, designing the programs
remains a challenge, and using VR cannot be as easy or convenient as turning
on the TV set. However, advocates remain confident that obstacles will be
overcome, and there is no doubt that the technology is far more promising
than it was two decades ago.

* MULTILAYERED SECURITY: Data security has been discussed repeatedly
here,
the last time being in March. An article from BBC WORLD Online ("How
Monitoring Behaviour Could Unmask The Fraudsters" by Matthew Wall, 12 April
2016) discussed advances in data security by banks.

Online fraudsters ripped people off for billions of dollars in 2015. There's
no one magic answer for dealing with scammers; multiple layers of security
are required. The problem for financial service providers is that if they
impose too many layers, customers get annoyed. The customers don't want to
spend too much time answering secret security questions, keying in passcodes,
or trying, and failing, to remember personal identification numbers and
passwords.

That has resulted in a push for unobtrusive security. For example, voice
biometrics -- that is, using our unique vocal patterns as a means of
authentication -- is gaining acceptance among banks as it becomes less
prone to false positives and false negatives. HSBC, a Britain-based
international bank, has announced it will be rolling out voice biometric
technology, along with Apple's Touch ID fingerprint recognition; Barclays
already offers it to certain clients. Meanwhile, Atom Bank has launched
"authentication by selfie".

However, any biometric ID can be faked, which is why "behavioral analysis" is
also catching on as a non-intrusive way of establishing identity. The UK's
Nationwide Building Society has just teamed up with tech partners BehavioSec
and Unisys to develop a new layer of behavioral biometric security. It is
based on the idea that the way we interact with our devices is as unique as
those physical biometric attributes. The way we type, touch, swipe and hold
our smartphones can also apparently act like a signature.

Behavioral analysis is not a very mature technology, but it has the advantage
that it is usually unobtrusive. Pindrop, a tech company based in Atlanta,
Georgia, specializes in authenticating people who ring call centers -- a
particularly vulnerable element in a financial services company's defenses.
Pindrop names three out of the four top US banks as clients. The usual
security methods when calling in -- answers to knowledge-based questions,
such as your mother's maiden name or first school, for example -- are very
weak, being easily gleaned by fraudsters from social media or hacking.

"Even your caller ID can be easily spoofed using VoIP," according to Matt
Peachey, Pindrop's general manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa. As a
result, the firm's automated technology analyzes many other elements of a
phone call -- the geographical origin, the device type, the timbre of the
sound, to name but a few of the 147 measurables -- and creates a risk score
for each call. Peachy says: "Your phone actually imprints a unique sound
into the call which you can't discern with the human ear, so we can usually
tell if a fraudster is pretending to call from a local landline but actually
using VoIP."

The tech also analyzes caller behavior. Multiple calls from different
devices and networks, but purporting to be from the same customer, will raise
alarm bells, for example. Peachey maintains: "Our tech is catching north of
80% of all fraudulent calls."

Pindrop also uses voice biometrics, but only for "fraudster blacklisting" --
spotting repeat offenders. The drawback with voice biometrics is
that customers have to enroll for the system and record their unique
voiceprint for the database. Not everyone bothers or wants to, meaning
that voice biometrics can't be used as a universal solution.

In the short term, growing numbers of banks are incorporating two-factor
authentication to their online and mobile banking services. This usually
means logging in to an online account -- with those troublesome passwords
and numeric codes - then generating an additional one-off, time-limited code
on a separate device -- a smartphone or another gadget. This process
is highly, if not perfectly, secure, but it's also fiddly.

US tech firm Duo Security aims to make this easier by sending a message to an
app on a customer's phone that contains a simple green or red button. One
tap on either button confirms or cancels the transaction. The firm's
co-founder and chief technology officer, Jon Oberheide, says: "There's no
code to input to a countdown, so logging in is much simpler. Financial
services companies want to improve their security, but they don't want to
annoy their users with cumbersome security protocols."

One of Duo's 5,000 customers worldwide is US banking technology firm Computer
Services INC (CSI), which provides transaction processing and online banking
services for about 3,000 financial institutions. According to Kevin Latta,
CSI's vice president, network and security: "Most computers are infected
with some kind of malware, so this is why this kind of additional
authentication is so important. We give client institutions a choice over
whether they use Duo Security. But I've never seen those who do use it
suffer incidences of fraud. Thieves always go for the low-hanging fruit."

This another reason for the move towards unobtrusive security: if it's
obtrusive, customers tend to hotwire around it, defeating it themselves.
For all the public furor over online security, everybody knows the weakest
link in the system is ourselves.

* AI REVOLUTION (2): The neural network is a traditional component of
artificial intelligence technology, developed in the 1950s by researchers
using the brain as a model. Brains don't use transistors, they use neurons
-- spindly, highly interlinked cells that pass electrochemical signals
between themselves -- with the neurons recognizing elaborate patterns and
operating in cyclical, interwoven loops.

Early artificial neural networks were hardly more than cartoonish caricatures
of the real thing, but early experiments suggested they were still very
powerful. Chris Bishop, an AI researcher with Microsoft, points out that
telephone companies have, since the 1960s, been using echo-canceling
algorithms discovered by neural networks. However, it was like climbing a
tree to reach the Moon: the neural networks of the era were toys, simply not
up to heavy lifting.

In the past few years, however, the remarkable number-crunching power of
chips developed for the demanding job of drawing video-game graphics has
revived interest. Early neural networks were limited to dozens or hundreds
of neurons, usually organized as a single layer. The latest, used by the
likes of Google, can simulate billions. With that many ersatz neurons
available, researchers can afford to take another cue from the brain and
organize them in distinct, hierarchical layers. It is this use of
interlinked layers that puts the "deep" into deep learning.

Each layer of the network deals with a different level of abstraction. To
process an image, for example, the lowest layer is fed the raw image. It
notes things like the brightness and colors of individual pixels, and how
those properties are distributed across the image. The next layer combines
these observations into more abstract categories, identifying edges, shadows
and the like. The layer after that will analyze those edges and shadows in
turn, looking for combinations that signify features such as eyes, lips and
ears. And these can then be combined into a representation of a face -- and
in fact not just any face, but even a new image of a particular face that the
network has seen before.

Neural networks are not so much programmed as they are trained. A machine
that performs facial recognition, for example, will be presented with a
"training set" of thousands of images. Some will contain faces and some will
not, with each accordingly labeled as such by a human. The images act as
inputs to the system; the labels ("face" or "NOT face") as outputs. The
neural network's task is to come up with a statistical rule that correlates
inputs with the correct outputs. To do that, it will hunt at every level of
abstraction for whatever features are common to those images showing faces.
Once these correlations are good enough, the machine will be able, reliably,
to tell faces from not-faces in its training set. The next step is to let it
loose on a fresh set of images, to see if the facial-recognition rules it has
derived hold up in the real world.

By working from the bottom up in this way, machine-learning algorithms learn
to recognize features, concepts, and categories that humans understand, but
struggle to define in computer code. However, for a long time such
algorithms were narrowly specialized. It was normal to provide little tweaks
via bits of code to help the neural system process images, or perform voice
recognition.

Earlier neural networks, moreover, had only a limited capacity for data. The
networks lacked discrimination; beyond a certain point, feeding them more
information did not boost their performance. Modern systems need far less
hand-holding and tweaking, and can handle as much data as can be thrown at
them. They've come of age just in time for the era of "big data".

Big internet companies like Baidu, Google, and Facebook sit on huge
quantities of information generated by their users, such as volumes of
emails; vast piles of search and buying histories; endless images of faces,
cars, cats and almost everything else in the world pile up. There's vast
amounts of useful information hiding in that data, but trying to sort it out
would be a nightmare without deep learning. Fortunately, users do help by
generally trying to label their data for their own use.

Now progress is impressive. In 2014, Facebook unveiled an algorithm called
"DeepFace" that can recognize specific human faces in images around 97% of
the time -- even when those faces are partly hidden or poorly lit. That's
about as well as humans can do. Microsoft claims that the object-recognition
software it is developing for Cortana, the firm's digital personal assistant,
can tell its users the difference between a picture of a Pembroke Welsh Corgi
and a Cardigan Welsh Corgi, two dog breeds that look almost identical. Some
countries, including Britain, already use face-recognition technology for
border control, while a system capable of recognizing individuals from video
footage has obvious appeal for policemen and spies. A recent report showed
how America's spies use voice-recognition software to convert phone calls
into text, in order to make their contents easier to search.

That is only getting started. Neural chips are becoming bigger, and
researchers are finding out more they can do with them; they are currently
investigating feedback between higher and lower layers, which promises to
make them much smarter -- if a handle can be obtained on just how to do it
right. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (118): Premier Khrushchev's denunciations continued
unabated. When he called out: "What devil made the Americans do this?" --
de Gaulle calmly replied that there were devils everywhere, on both sides,
that spying went on all the time, and the matter was unworthy of
consideration by heads of government who were working for peace. Khrushchev
shook his head in frustration and went on reading, ending with a demand for
an apology from Eisenhower; if it wasn't forthcoming, the conference was at
an end.

Eisenhower responded with a statement justifying the overflights, to then say
they would cease. Of course they would; the Soviets having shot down the
U-2, it made no sense to send another one in -- and though progress on the
CORONA spy satellites was slow, they were likely to be operational in the
near future. Khrushchev was not placated, again demanding an apology. De
Gaulle answered, his patience now showing a bit of strain:

BEGIN QUOTE;

Chairman Khrushchev, you have imposed conditions that are obviously
impossible for General Eisenhower to accept. Before you left Moscow and
after the U-2 was shot down, I sent my ambassador to see you to ask whether
this meeting should be held or should be postponed. You knew everything then
that you know now. You told my ambassador that this conference should be
held, and that it would be fruitful. I repeated this question to you when I
saw you alone before this meeting, and once again you said it should be held.

Now, by imposing conditions that cannot be met by the American president, you
make it impossible to go further. You have brought Mr. Macmillan here from
London, General Eisenhower from the United States, and have put me to serious
inconvenience to attend a meeting which your intransigence would make
impossible. We should all reflect on this and on the hopes that the people
of the world have placed in this meeting and meet again here tomorrow at the
same time.

END QUOTE

Khrushchev leaped to his feet and again demanded an apology, saying the
Soviets would walk out if it were not given. De Gaulle simply looked at him
as if he were a badly-behaved small child, then announced that the conference
would meet again tomorrow. The Soviet delegation left in a huff.

There was an awkward moment, the remaining participants not quite sure of
what to do next. De Gaulle ended the muddle by saying he would get in touch
with the Soviets to see if they would decide to talk after all, with
everybody then rising to leave. De Gaulle went to Eisenhower and took him by
the arm, to then say: "I do not know what Khrushchev is going to do, nor
what is going to happen, but whatever he does, I want you to know that I am
with you to the end."

That was a burst of sunshine through Eisenhower's gloom; as the president
got into the car, he told General Walters: "He's quite a guy." The car took
them to the US embassy residence, where the American delegation discussed
what to do next. There wasn't much that could be said; Eisenhower's promise
to end the overflights had obviously not placated Khrushchev at all.

In the meantime, Khrushchev had been holding a press conference, continuing
his railing against the United States. The three Western leaders met again
in the Elysee the following morning, 17 May, but the Soviets were a no-show.
De Gaulle commented in his dry way that Khrushchev had not spoken with him,
but was then out "kissing babies on the street and generally electioneering
for the French Communist Party."

De Gaulle sent a message to Khrushchev to ask him if he were planning to
attend. An aide later came back, reporting that Khrushchev said he would not
attend unless Eisenhower apologized. De Gaulle finally got visibly
irritated, telling the aide that, since Khrushchev had been queried in
writing, he should respond in writing. After another go-round, the aide came
back to say Khrushchev refused to reply in writing. De Gaulle was not
content to leave matters at that, relaying a third message through the aide:
"Tell him it is the usage between civilized nations to reply to written
communications by written communications."

The answer finally came back from Khrushchev that he would reply in writing,
but would not attend. De Gaulle, appearing satisfied with having impressed
on Khrushchev the need for some little manners, adjourned the conference.
Neither de Gaulle nor Macmillan -- the prime minister was much more visibly
distressed than de Gaulle, who was no more than annoyed -- suggested that
Eisenhower apologize to Khrushchev. The president then flew off to visit
Portugal. General Walters commented later:

BEGIN QUOTE:

It seemed to me that the Soviets had gambled on a capitulation by Eisenhower,
and were disoriented when it was not forthcoming. They had counted on both
de Gaulle and Macmillan to pressure Eisenhower for some form of apology, and
this had not happened.

END QUOTE

Khrushchev ended his Paris trip with a press conference, mostly in the same
vein as his earlier statements, but ending with a plea for peace. A
following talk at the Soviet embassy in Paris to Warsaw Pact diplomats did
not go well, some of the audience finding him wild and unbalanced. The
premier returned to Moscow in a black mood. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* WINGS & WEAPONS: In the latest zig-zag of the ever-unpredictable
airship business, Lockheed Martin is proceeding on construction of a
prototype of a hybrid airship, the "LMH-1", discussed
here
in 2015. Initial flight is expected in 2017, with introduction to service in
2018. Working through Hybrid Enterprises, its Atlanta-based wholly-owned
reseller and aftermarket provider, Lockheed Martin has inked an agreement
with Straightline Aviation of the UK, a "service for hire" firm, for a dozen
LMH-1s at about $40 million USD each. If LMH-1 sells well, the company will
go on to larger airships that will be able to compete with ocean-going
vessels.

The LMH-1 is 85.4 meters (280 feet) long, with about ten times the
envelope displacement of the earlier Lockheed Martin P791 demonstrator
airship, discussed
here
in 2006. The LMH-1 is capable of carrying 21,315 kilograms (47,000 pounds)
of payload and up to 19 passengers, over ranges of up to 2,590 kilometers
(1,610 miles / 1,400 NMI), with a cruise speed of 110 KPH (70 MPH / 60 KT).
Cruise altitude will be 3,050 meters (10,000 feet), though there will be
provision for crew oxygen for ferry flights and transiting mountain ranges.

Like the P791, the LMH-1 is not quite lighter-than-air; it gets 80% of its
lift from helium gas cells, 20% of its lift from its tiltable prop engines
and tri-lobed hull. It will be powered by 225-kW (300-HP) vee-6 diesel
engines, driving three-bladed propellers with a diameter of 2.75 meters (9
feet). Lockheed hasn't selected an engine supplier yet, saying the likely
choice is a certified aviation engine derived from the automotive industry.

Kent Trenkle, LMH-1 systems engineering integration, test and certification
lead, says: "The full-axis [fly-by-wire flight control] system controls four
tails, the four thrusters, the throttles, and the pitch of the blades. In
addition, it controls each of the propulsor gimbals, so it is a complex
flight control system and algorithm controlling up to 16 different things."

The LMH-1's FCS leverages off software developed for take-offs and landings
of the F-35B short-take-off / vertical-landing version of the Joint Strike
Fighter. An air cushion landing system (ACLS) based on the P791 system will
be used for landing and ground operations on all surface types, including
water. Unlike the P791's four-pad ACLS, the LMH-1 system will incorporate
two main pads aft and a smaller, forward-mounted ACLS pad.

The cockpit is fitted with flat-panel multifunction displays, sidestick
controllers, and a "speed lever". The gondola for passengers and cargo is
45.7 meters (150 feet) long, 3 meters (10 feet) tall, and 3 meters (10 feet)
wide. The cargo is carried in an 18.3-meter (60-foot) long section aft that
opens up for loading and unloading at truck-bed height. For longer loads,
the cargo bay doors can remain open in flight.

Lockheed Martin has competition from Hybrid Air Vehicles, the UK-based
developer of the Airlander 10, mentioned
here
in 2010. The Airlander prototype is being readied for flight and is expected
to make an appearance at this year's Farnborough International Airshow in
Britain. Lockheed Martin business development manager Craig Johnston says
that's all for the good: "We have plenty of market space; there are no
issues. We know for sure there is an initial market for 12, but ultimately
there will be many hundreds over the next decade, and they will be spread all
over the world."

One hopes so, but after so many years of disappointment, we'll believe it
when we see it. Still, after flying the P791, Lockheed Martin went on to the
LMH-1, even though it took a decade, and so the commitment's clearly there.

* The US Navy's SM-3 anti-missile missile and its "Aegis Ashore" direction
system, for land-based operations, was discussed
here
a few months back, with mention that Aegis Ashore was then being installed at
a site in Romania. The other shoe has dropped, with the installation being
declared operational in May.

The site is at an old Romanian air base in Deveseul, about 180 kilometers
(110 miles) southwest of Bucharest. The installation includes an Aegis-type
radar and direction system, plus batteries of SM-3 missiles. The Russians
have complained loudly about the fielding of anti-missile interceptors to
Eastern Europe -- but NATO officials respond that the weapons are only
intended to deal with a "pot-shot" from a rogue state like Iran.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said: "The interceptors are too few
and located too far south or too close to Russia to be able to intercept
Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles." The mission was instead
"to tackle the potential threat posed by short and medium- range attacks from
outside the Euro-Atlantic area".

Nonetheless, the ABM site does underline the commitment of the US to protect
NATO members in Eastern Europe, which is likely exactly what provokes the
Russians. The ground is now being broken for an interceptor site in Poland,
which will be activated in 2018.

* The US Navy has been going around on development of a carrier-based attack
drone for some years now, under the designation of "Unmanned Carrier-Launched
Airborne Surveillance & Strike (UCLASS)", having performed carrier trials of
the Northrop Grumman X-47B demonstrator.

Defense programs have a way of dying and reviving around; in 2015, a Pentagon
review killed UCLASS -- to now resurrect it as the "MQ-25 Stingray", which
will de-emphasize the UCLASS strike and reconnaissance mission to focus on
the mid-air refueling mission, the intent being to offload overworked Boeing
F/A-18 Super Hornets in that role. Other missions will be considered as
experience with the MQ-25 in service allows; the machine is being designed
for flexibility. Stealth features are no longer seen as a primary need.
Current plans envision a contract award in 2018, and initial delivery in
2021.

The MQ-25 will be able to carry a range of external stores, not just tanker
kit, but it is not seen as an offensive platform for now. Northrop Grumman
is expected to offer an X-47B derivative; Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and
General Atomics will also offer solutions.

* TRACKING EMISSIONS: As discussed by an article from AAAS SCIENCE
("Carbon Trackers Could Help Bolster Climate Vows" by Warren Cornwall, 18
December 2015), at the climate summit in Paris in December 2015, the world's
nations committed themselves to cutting emissions of greenhouse gases.
That was very inspiring, but it left a question dangling: how do countries
determine what their emissions really are, so the authorities know if they
are really reducing them?

At the present time, it is possible to accurately track the rising
concentration of CO2 over the globe -- thanks to a network of ground
stations, as well as satellite observations. It is not so easy to do so on a
more local basis, that being done by inference from statistics. However,
researchers are now in the early stages of deploying carbon-tracking systems
that will monitor local greenhouse gas emissions. A few experimental,
city-scale monitoring systems are up and running. Ultimately, a network of
instruments on satellites, commercial jets, smokestacks, and communications
towers could deliver a detailed, nearly instantaneous picture of emissions in
a country, city, or even a neighborhood.

Riley Duren, an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
California, commented: "A carbon weather service is probably the best
example of where we probably ought to get in the future." Duren heads the
"Megacities Carbon Project", which is building a first-generation measurement
system in Los Angeles, California. The idea got a boost earlier this year
when the United Nations World Meteorological Organization (WMO) endorsed the
creation of the "Integrated Global Greenhouse Gas Information System", to
promote networks for tracking greenhouse gases.

Today, the best data on CO2 are the atmospheric concentrations measured at
more than 40 stations around the world. Emissions for countries or cities
are estimated by adding up statistics on fuel consumption, deforestation,
electricity generation, and other activities. Developed nations have refined
these procedures to provide good data; however, in developing nations, which
account for 60% of climate emissions, the data isn't so good. In October
2015, the European Union's Earth observation agency, Copernicus, warned that
such uncertainties "could undermine the credibility and the stability of
future climate agreements."

Pilot emissions-tracking networks are now being set up, with cities, where a
majority of human-caused greenhouse gases originate, serving as testing
grounds. Over the last five years Indianapolis, Boston, Los Angeles, and
Paris have been outfitted with equipment to track their carbon emissions.
Another network is being built around Washington DC, and it may eventually be
extended up the East Coast to Boston -- according to James Whetstone, a
scientist and manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology
in Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is helping fund several of the US projects.

Los Angeles provides a case study for such networks. Today, 13 devices
mounted high on tall buildings and cellphone and radio towers measure CO2
across an area of 17,000 square kilometers (6,550 square miles); some also
track methane, a potent greenhouse gas. On top nearby Mount Wilson, a device
scans the basin every 90 minutes, detecting the infrared signatures of the
gases. Airplanes zero in on hot spots identified by the stationary
instruments, with drones likely to take over the job in the future. NASA's
Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite periodically surveys the city
for a big-picture snapshot. The data are combined with computer models of
wind patterns, and a detailed inventory of carbon-generating activities such
as traffic.

The result is an emerging picture of how Los Angeles "breathes" greenhouse
gases. The work has already helped scientists pinpoint larger-than-expected
methane plumes from a landfill and an oil field. The scientists also plan to
monitor the impact of new efforts to cut emissions from traffic congestion,
and to monitor large industrial facilities to see whether they're meeting
state greenhouse gas targets.

However, the project is not yet in a league with weather reports. It's
tricky to model how winds come off the Pacific Ocean and interact with the
surrounding mountains. Data on sources such as fuel use get stale quickly.
The tower network has gaps, and OCO-2 is better at tracking global flows of
carbon than at measuring human-caused emissions on the scale of a city.

NASA's OCO-3 satellite, delayed by funding cuts, could take more detailed
measurements, and the European Union's Copernicus agency is in discussions
for a European emissions-tracking satellite. Even better results could come
from geostationary satellites parked over a continent, providing a continuous
view -- but nobody is planning one. Indeed, at the moment, international
discussions of climate change have paid little attention to monitoring carbon
emissions.

So far, such carbon monitoring data aren't a key part of international
climate policies. A state department official at the Paris talks says that
although the technologies could be useful, they "aren't being considered as
part of international agreements."

Phil DeCola -- a former NASA scientist and White House science adviser who is
chairman of the WMO greenhouse-gas tracking project -- commented: "I don't
want to be responsible for another grand research strategy for the circular
file of posterity. The bottom line is we can produce useful information.
But will the information be used?"

* THE RESCUE BUSINESS: An article from THE ECONOMIST ("Risky Business",
30 April 2016), began in the London offices of International SOS (ISOS), the
world's biggest travel-security firm. The facility has a central control
room, with multiple workstations and large displays, allowing staff to keep
track of what's happening in the world relative to the safety of the firm's
clients -- which include almost two-thirds of the Fortune Global 500
companies. ISOS runs 26 other centers around the world. Business, according
to company officials, has never been better.

Sometimes the company's assistance is petty. Parents of a child who
swallowed a coin while visiting Nigeria asked ISOS what to do; the advice was
to let nature take its course. Sometimes the tasks are much more
challenging, for example assisting international non-governmental
organization (NGOs) in keeping their people safe during the collapse of
social order in Burundi in 2015.

Tim Willis, a former army officer who is the firm's European security
director, explains: "When the president [Pierre Nkurunziza] started talking
about serving an unconstitutional third term, we thought: LOOK OUT! -- and
began sending alerts to our members. When the balloon went up in May, their
families had got out, and they were prepared."

As the country descended into chaos, a nurse was sent to support one client,
while a local security provider was told to stand by with vehicles, and an
ISOS manager flew to neighboring Rwanda to co-ordinate. Next, a handful of
people were moved to a secure hotel, to then make their way out of the
country when the road to the border was judged safe for passage. In the
meantime, a plane was being chartered in Nairobi to collect another 73
employees of a client from the airport at Bujumbura, the capital, and fly
them to Rwanda's capital, Kigali. Willis calls the operation "boring ...
which is what we want."

The company's services are in demand because of globalization, resulting in
ever-increasing business travel and tourism; political instability, spreading
in an arc from the Persian Gulf to sub-Saharan Africa; and fear of terrorism
in places once thought safe, such as Istanbul, Jakarta, Paris, and Brussels.
China's growing international footprint means more business as well. Last
year ISOS saw its "outbound" China business grow by 46%, thanks in part to
Beijing's commitment to building a "new silk road" from Central Asia to the
Mediterranean.

Founded over three decades ago to provide emergency medical care for
Europeans working in Southeast Asia, ISOS has become a global operation.
When the Arab Spring flared up in 2011, ISOS had the resources to carry out
large-scale evacuations from Egypt -- 1,250 people -- and then Libya -- 1,500
people.

Since 2001, ISOS has grown from revenues of $250 million USD a year and 2,500
employees to $1.5 billion USD and a staff of 11,000, which includes over
5,000 medical professionals and 200 security specialists. Operating from
around 1,000 locations in 90 countries, it takes nearly 5 million assistance
calls every year. Most are mundane; while large-scale evacuations from
countries collapsing into revolution get the headlines, a survey of the
firm's clients in 2015 showed that only 11% were threatened by terrorism, as
opposed to 34% who were victims of petty crime, and 33% who were victims of
traffic accidents.

ISOS keeps close tabs on its personnel to make sure they can get into action
quickly and effectively. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001,
ISOS introduced travel-tracking technology that provides real-time data about
employee movements. Now, apps on phones using GPS can establish virtual
secure areas -- what's called "geo-fencing". A panic button on the phone
sends SMS and e-mail alerts with location information if someone leaves or
enters designated perimeters.

ISOS -- and its smaller rivals, such as Anvil Group of the UK and iJet
of the US -- doesn't just react to emergencies, but actively prepare for
them. Company officials work to understand where and how threats arise,
and determining how to deal with them. That of course is a necessary part of
the service ISOS provides, but it also protects the firm from litigation;
clients are likely to be unhappy if ISOS drops the ball when the firm should
have been prepared. This is not such a worry to ISOS officials, however;
client satisfaction is high, and nobody is expecting business to decline in
the future.

* AI REVOLUTION (1): As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("Rise
Of The Machines", 9 May 2015), there has been considerable advance in
artificial intelligence (AI) technology over the past decade. Not everyone
is happy with AI; serial entrepreneur Elon Musk, a person not given to subtle
understatement, compared AI to "summoning the demon", and claims that the
creation of intelligences that will rival, or exceed, human intelligence is
the biggest threat facing the Earth. Others have compared the menace of AI
to the planet as comparable to that of giant asteroid strikes or total
nuclear war.

Those working on AI technology haven't taken much notice of such fuss, being
too busy riding the leading edge of the wave. Firms such as Google,
Facebook, Amazon, and China's Baidu are now in an AI arms race, head-hunting
for the best researchers, setting up labs, and buying start-up companies.
Few of them worry about machines taking over; they instead are trying to
build machines that can take over drudgery jobs traditionally reserved for
humans.

While the capacities of digital micro-electronics are approaching their
limits, the silicon technologies available are staggeringly capable, and
there remains a lot of room to move in innovative hardware architectures
-- while software continues to be open-ended. Machines are vastly smarter
than they were even a decade ago, able to understand languages, recognize
images, and perform other brainy tasks. Business is taking notice, as are
people whose jobs are threatened by AI.

Big money is being pumped into AI, with startup companies attracting wealthy
backers. In 2014, Google was rumored to have paid $400 million USD for
DeepMind, a London-based AI startup. Facebook had been after DeepMind as
well, but also has its own AI research lab, headed by Yann LeCun, a star
researcher hired from New York University. Google once employed Andrew Ng,
an AI guru from Stanford University, until Baidu bought him off in 2014 to
head up a new, Silicon Valley-based lab of its own.

AI is nothing new, the basic concepts going back to the beginning of the
computer age, but progress was slow for decades, and useful applications
few. Now AI researchers are excited over what they call "deep learning",
an extension of the traditional AI sub-domain of "machine learning", in
which computers teach themselves tasks by being fed volumes of relevant
data. Deep learning is a means of bridging the gap that has long plagued
AI: tasks that are hard for humans are generally easy for machines, and
tasks that are easy for humans are generally hard for machines. Even the
least powerful computer can play a game of chess that challenges any player
below expert level; but computers have traditionally had problems doing
things that humans do without thinking, such as recognizing faces, decoding
speech, and identifying objects in images.

Under close examination, that's not so perverse. Early AI researchers were
encouraged, too much so, by how relatively straightforward it was to get a
computer to do things like play chess or perform algebraic analysis, but such
things were defined by straightforward rules, easy to translate into rules a
computer could understand. A computer could also perform "brute-force"
searches of chess moves, allowing it to see many more moves ahead than the
ordinary human player; and tailoring its searches by factoring in common
chess strategies made it even more formidable as more strategies were added.

However, tasks like language recognition and translation were tougher,
because languages are flexible and follow variable rules; it's not easy to
break them down into rules that cover all the possibilities. A computer
could generate text from rules easily enough, but understanding arbitrary
text fed to it was very hard. In machine learning, a computer is simply fed
text, being told what the text means; as more text is fed the computer, the
better able it is to read the text. The most common approach is to use a
"neural network", which takes its lead from animal brains, not traditional
computer architectures. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (117): When Khrushchev and his entourage left the Moscow
airport on 14 May 1960 to attend the Paris summit, he made it clear that he
would take a hard line in the talks: he would demand that Eisenhower
apologize for the U-2 overflights, punish those responsible, and declare that
overflights would cease. Khrushchev admitted it was unlikely that the
president would budge on these demands, but the premier felt he had no
alternative.

By the time Khrushchev arrived in Paris, he had worked himself into a frenzy.
The next day, 15 May, he talked with de Gaulle, venting at such length as to
suggest to the French president that the premier was a character "in the
realm of Russian fiction." De Gaulle's attempts to calm matters only
provoked "a show of furious indignation". Khrushchev was not boiling over
when he talked to Macmillan later that day, but he was just as uncompromising
in his message.

Eisenhower and his entourage visited de Gaulle later on 15 May, with his
interpreter, General Vernon Walters, recording that scene and those that
followed later in Paris. Walters noted that Eisenhower was one of the few
people de Gaulle did not talk down to; indeed, de Gaulle demonstrated real
warmth with him. The French president told his visitors about his talk, such
as it was, with Khrushchev earlier in the day, describing how enraged the
Soviet premier was, and that he had demanded an apology from Eisenhower. De
Gaulle told Eisenhower: "Obviously, you cannot apologize, but you must
decide how you wish to handle this. I will do everything I can to be helpful
without being openly partisan."

De Gaulle added that a few days earlier, before the Soviet group had left
Moscow, he had told the French ambassador in Moscow to ask the Kremlin if the
summit were still on; the reply was YES. De Gaulle had asked the same
question of Khrushchev earlier in the day; the reply was still YES, though
the premier continued to insist that Eisenhower apologize. De Gaulle had
replied, in his haughty way, that he, Khrushchev, could not seriously expect
any such thing; that was simply not done between serious heads of government.
Since Khrushchev nonetheless insisted on going ahead with the conference, de
Gaulle was optimistic that Khrushchev was mostly blowing off steam -- but
cautiously added: "We shall see."

That same day, the Soviets launched their fourth satellite, publicly
announced as "Sputnik 4", with no details announced. It was actually the
"Korabl Sputnik 1", the first unmanned flight test of a Vostok space capsule.
It only carried a dummy named "Ivan Ivanovich" -- the Russian equivalent of
"John Smith" -- and was a failure, the spacecraft being trapped in orbit for
two years. Rumors later circulated in the West that it had carried a
cosmonaut, and that the Soviets had covered up his death. Sputnik 4 would
play a minor role in the subsequent events in Paris.

* The following morning, 16 May, the leaders -- including de Gaulle,
Macmillan, Eisenhower, and Khrushchev -- and their aides met in the Elysee
Palace, the French counterpart of the White House. De Gaulle began the
session by suggesting that Eisenhower speak first; but Khrushchev, clearly
agitated, demanded that he speak first instead, with a prepared statement.
De Gaulle raised his eyebrows and looked at Eisenhower, who nodded; and so
Khrushchev began to read his statement, in very loud voice. As Khrushchev
ranted on, de Gaulle, having heard much the same the previous day, took on an
expression of strained patience.

Khrushchev was so angry that his hands were shaking, and as he read, he
became ever angrier. At one point, his voice began to rise towards
screaming; De Gaulle interrupted him and told Khrushchev's interpreter: "The
acoustics in this room are excellent. We can all hear the chairman. There
is no need for him to raise his voice."

The interpreter was taken aback, but translated the remark into Russian.
Khrushchev paused, glared over the top of his glasses at de Gaulle, but then
went on at reduced volume. He denounced the U-2 overflights, pointing up to
the ceiling as if one were overhead. De Gaulle interrupted again: "I, too,
have been overflown."

Khrushchev replied: "By your American allies?!"

"No, by you. Yesterday that satellite [Sputnik 4] you launched just before
you left Moscow to impress us overflew the sky of France 18 times without my
permission. How do I know you do not have cameras aboard which are taking
pictures of my country?"

De Gaulle crossed his arms and looked at Khrushchev; now it was the premier's
turn to be taken aback. Khrushchev had been needled by Mao Zedong, but there
was something sneering and adolescent in Mao's condescension; Mao was not in
a league with de Gaulle, who spoke down to Khrushchev, without a trace of
self-consciousness, as if from an Olympian height. Then the premier took on
an expression of peace, and raised his hands: "God sees me. My hands are
clean. You don't think I would do a thing like that?"

The phrase was odd, coming from a pointedly atheistic communist, but de
Gaulle continued with his questioning: "Well, how did you take those
pictures of the far side of the Moon which you showed us with such
justifiable pride?"

"Ah, in that one I had cameras."

"Ah, in that one you had cameras. Pray, continue."

De Gaulle's needling was not so far off the mark, since the Vostok space
capsule was, to a considerable extent, also a prototype of the Zenit spy
satellite. Khrushchev did continue, his hands shaking even more. Although
Eisenhower was clearly becoming angry, he said nothing, instead restlessly
doodling on a piece of paper; Macmillan appeared uneasy, while de Gaulle
clearly found the scene tiresome. [TO BE CONTINUED]

-- 06 MAY 16 / JCSAT 14 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 FT booster was launched from
Cape Canaveral at 0521 UTC (local time + 4) to put the "JCSAT 14"
geostationary comsat into orbit, for Tokyo-based SKY Perfect JSAT Corp.
JCSAT 14 was built by Space Systems / Loral, being based on the SSL-1300
comsat platform; it had a launch mass of 4,696 kilograms (10,353 pounds), a
payload of 26 C-band / 18 Ku-band transponders, and a design life of 15
years.

JCSAT 14 was placed in the geostationary slot at 154 degrees east longitude
to support data networks, television broadcasters, and mobile communications
users in Japan, East Asia, Russia, Oceania, Hawaii and other Pacific islands.
The space platform was renamed "JCSAT 2B" after entering operational service.
The Falcon 9 FT main stage successfully soft-landed on a platform in the
Atlantic, this being the third soft landing in seven attempts.

-- 15 MAY 16 / YAOGAN 30 -- A Chinese Long March 2D booster was launched
from Jiuquan at 0243 UTC (local time - 8) to put the "Yaogan 30" satellite
into polar Sun-synchronous orbit. It was described as an Earth-observation
satellite for civil use, but was apparently an optical military surveillance
satellite.

-- 24 MAY 16 / GALILEO 13 & 14 -- A Soyuz STB-Fregat booster was launched
from Kourou at 0848 UTC (local time + 3) to put two "Galileo" navigation
satellites into orbit. These were the 13th and 14th satellites, the 10th and
11th of the "full operational constellation (FOC)" satellites. The complete
Galileo constellation will consist of 30 satellites along three orbital
planes in medium Earth orbit, including two spares per orbit.

-- 27 MAY 16 / THAICOM 8 -- A SpaceX Falcon 9 FT booster was launched
from Cape Canaveral to put the "Thaicom 8" geostationary comsat into orbit.
Thaicom 8 had a launch mass of 3,200 kilograms (7,100 pounds). It was based
on the Orbital ATK around the GEOStar-2.3 satellite bus, also used for the
earlier "Thaicom 6" spacecraft, with a payload of 24 Ku-band transponders,
and a design life of 15 years. The satellite was placed in the geostationary
slot at 76.5 degrees east, to provide data relay and broadcasting to
Thailand, India and East Africa. The Falcon 9 FT main stage successfully
performed a soft landing on the SpaceX automated recovery barge.

-- 29 MAY 16 / COSMOS 2516 (GLONASS M) -- A Russian Soyuz 2-1b booster
was launched from Plesetsk Northern Cosmodrome at 0844 UTC (local time - 4)
to put the "Cosmos 2516" GLONASS M third-generation navigation satellite into
orbit. It had a launch mass of 1,415 kilograms (3,120 pounds). It was the
53rd satellite in the GLONASS fleet. It brought the GLONASS constellation up
to a total of 28 satellites in orbit, including three spares.

-- 30 MAY 16 / ZIYUAN 3-2 -- A Chinese Long March 4B booster was launched
from Taiyuan at 0000 UTC (local time - 8) to put the second "Ziyuan 3" land
survey satellite into near-polar Sun-synchronous orbit. Ziyuan 3-2 had a
launch mass of about 2,630 kilograms (5,800 pounds). It carried three
high-resolution panchromatic cameras and an infrared multispectral scanner.
The cameras were positioned at the front-facing, ground-facing, and
rear-facing positions. The resolution of the mapping camera system was
improved compared to Ziyuan 3-1, being enhanced from 3.5 to 2.7 meters.

Ziyuan 3-2 was to conduct surveys on land resources, help with natural
disaster-reduction and prevention and lend assistance to farming, water
conservation, urban planning and other sectors, surveying the area between 84
degrees north and 84 degrees south latitude. The mission was to last four
years, with a possible extension to five. The ZY-3 satellites were designed
and constructed by CAST/BISSE (China Academy of Space Technology / Beijing
Institute of Spacecraft System Engineering) for the Chinese Ministry of Land
and Resources.

The launch also included the "NuSat 1" and "NuSat 2" commercial
high-resolution Earth observation microsatellites for Satellogic of
Argentina. The two satellites each had a payload of three imagers -- one
infrared, one color, and one hyperspectral, with a best resolution of a meter
-- and a launch mass of 35 kilograms (77 pounds). They were precursors to an
"Aleph-1" constellation of 25 similar small spacecraft.

* ALWAYS CHANGING: As discussed by an article from AAAS SCIENCE NOW
Online ("Humans Are Still Evolving -- And We Can Watch It Happen"
by Elizabeth Pennisi, 17 May 2016), two new studies have shown how the human
genome has changed in recent history, showing how since Roman times the
British have evolved to be taller and fairer, and how just in the last
generation the effect of a gene that favors cigarette smoking has dwindled in
some groups.

Evolutionary change occurs in populations as modified genes arise through
mutation, and then spread through that population. Every person carries
two copies of each gene, but any particular gene may vary slightly from
person to person, these variants being called "alleles". Mutations in one
allele might increase height, while those in another allele might decrease
it. If tall people have some survival or reproductive advantage over shorter
people, then the allele favoring height will gradually spread through the
population.

Thanks to giant genomic data sets, researchers can now track evolutionary
shifts in allele frequencies over short timescales. Jonathan Pritchard of
Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and his research team went
through a genomic data set of British citizens, counting unique "single-base
changes", found in each genome. Such idiosyncratic changes, or "singletons",
are likely recent, because they haven't had time to spread through the entire
population. Since alleles carry neighboring DNA with them as they circulate,
the number of singletons on DNA associated with an allele can be used as a
rough molecular clock; alleles associated with fewer singletons are more
recent arrivals in a population.

Pritchard's team analyzed 3,000 genomes collected under the British "UK10K"
sequencing project. For each allele of interest in each genome, they
calculated a "singleton density score". The more intense the selection on an
allele, the faster it spreads through a population, and the less time there
is for singletons to accumulate near it. The procedure can reveal selection
over the past 100 generations, or roughly 2,000 years.

The researchers found relatively few singletons near alleles that confer
lactose tolerance and that code for particular immune system receptors.
Among the British, these alleles have evidently been strongly selected and
have spread rapidly. The team also found fewer singletons near alleles for
blond hair and blue eyes, indicating that these traits have also rapidly
spread over the past 2,000 years. One evolutionary pressure may have been
Britain's overcast skies: genes for fair hair also cause lighter skin color,
which allows the body to make more vitamin D in conditions of weak sunlight.
Sexual selection could have been at work as well, driven by a preference for
blond mates.

With the help of computing power, Pritchard's team also detected selection in
traits controlled not by a single gene, but by tiny changes in suites of
hundreds of genes, encompassing height, head circumference in infants, and
hip size in females -- crucial for giving birth to those infants. By
inspecting the density of singletons flanking more than 4 million DNA
differences, they discovered that selection for all three traits occurred
across the genome in recent millennia.

* Joseph Pickrell, an evolutionary geneticist at New York Genome Center in
New York City, has taken a different approach to a similar end. He and his
research team took a close look at the genomes of 60,000 people of European
ancestry who had been genotyped by Kaiser Permanente in Northern California,
and 150,000 people from a massive UK sequencing effort called the UK Biobank.

The researchers wanted to see if alleles change frequency across individuals
of different ages, revealing selection at work within a generation or two.
The biobank included relatively few old people, but it did have information
about participants' parents, so the team also looked for connections between
parental death and allele frequencies in their children.

In the parents' generation, for example, the researchers saw a correlation
between early death in men and the presence in their children -- and so
presumably in the parents -- of a nicotine receptor allele that makes it
harder to quit smoking. Many of the men who died relatively young had
reached adulthood in the UK in the 1950s, when a pack-a-day habit was not
unusual among British men.

In contrast, the allele's frequency in women and in people from
Northern California did not vary with age, presumably because fewer in these
groups smoked heavily, and the allele did not affect their survival. As
smoking has been discouraged in recent decades, to considerable effect, the
pressure to weed out the allele has disappeared, and its frequency is
unchanged in younger men.

Pickrell's team detected other shifts as well. A set of gene variants
associated with late-onset menstruation was more common in longer-lived
women, suggesting a linkage. Pickrell also reported that the frequency of
the "ApoE4" allele, associated with Alzheimer's disease, drops in older
people, because carriers died early. Such analyses over short timeframes
will always be influenced by statistical noise -- but given large enough
populations, the signal of evolutionary change remains loud and clear.

* HEAVY-DUTY EVS: As discussed by an article from the YALE ENVIRONMENT
360 website ("As Electric Cars Stall, A Move To Greener Trucks and Buses" by
Cheryl Katz, 24 March 2016), this summer, Santa Rosa CA is becoming a bit
quieter, as noisy diesel garbage trucks are replaced by shiny and silent new
electric ones. The trucks themselves are built by Mack, but they are
driven by four electric motors, drawing power from a battery pack, with
regenerative braking feeding power back into the battery pack.

The garbage trucks can get almost 40 kilometers (24 miles) off a charge; they
have a multi-fuel gas-turbine engine to provide charging if the battery runs
low. Technically, they're hybrids, not pure EVs, but they're much more like
a pure EV than a piston-powered garbage truck; the turbine engine only weighs
about a tenth as much as a diesel powerplant, and the trucks can also be
recharged directly at their base facility.

The electric garbage trucks are the work of Ian Wright, one of the founders
of Tesla motors, who left Tesla to start Wrightspeed -- maker of electric
powertrains for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles. Although
electric passenger vehicles aren't selling so well in a time of low fuel
prices, bigger electric vehicles are rapidly establishing themselves in roles
such as city buses, delivery trucks, freight loaders, and even marine
ferries.

The new electric drives are particularly well suited to medium- and
heavy-duty vehicles that make frequent stops. Wright says: "We do garbage
trucks because a single truck burns 14,000 gallons [53,000 liters] a year."
Given $3 USD a gallon, that comes to $42,000 USD. The company is also
producing electric delivery trucks for FedEx -- more than 800 electric
delivery trucks are now being operated by FedEx and UPS -- and has had
inquiries for a variety of other applications, including mining trucks,
trains, and coastal patrol boats.

Christopher Knittel, director of the Center for Energy & Environmental
Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the
development of heavier-duty electric motors, batteries, and vehicle
technologies could potentially help cut commercial and municipal transport's
carbon emissions by 25% to 50% in the coming decades. Users of heavy
vehicles are organizations that typically think over longer ranges than
consumers, and are willing to pay more up-front to have lower long-term
operating costs.

Public transit represents a particularly promising market for heavy electric
vehicles. They're nothing all that new in that sector; electric cables or
rails have long powered trams and trains. Batteries liberate buses from
dependence on electric lines; buses can carry large battery packs, and in
city service they can easily perform an entire route on a single charge, with
the route taking them back to a charging station.

China is the world leader in manufacture and export of electric buses, and
also the biggest electric-bus user, with around 80,000 currently on the road,
with thousands more set to come. Electric buses are a particular benefit in
China's polluted cities; Shanghai is adding 1,400 electric buses a year
beginning from 2015.

Electric buses are also gaining ground in the USA and Europe, if not yet at
the same level as China. Dozens are already serving in places such as
Southern California's San Gabriel Valley; Nashville; and San Antonio, with US
cities preparing to buy several hundred more over the next few years. Even
London's iconic double-deckers are going electric, with the first five now in
service. One technology analysis firm estimates that global electric bus
sales will near 60,000 in 2017, and top 250,000 by 2025.

The primary selling points of electric trash trucks and buses are lower
operating costs and lower environmental impact, in terms of both emissions
and noise. Are they a cure for climate change? That's not and cannot be the
selling point, Wright saying: "On an individual basis, it makes enormous
amounts of sense. However, there are only 150,000 garbage trucks in the
country."

The climate-change issue is [almost] a red herring, electric garbage trucks
being worthwhile on their own merits. Wright believes that 90% of America's
garbage trucks will use electric drives within five years. However, it's not
completely a red herring; transport accounts for about 60% of US emissions,
with medium- and heavy-duty commercial rolling stock responsible for about a
quarter of that. 15% of emissions is a substantial bite, and nobody says
there's any one solution to the climate change issue in the first place.
According to Knittel: "There's no silver bullet here, but there's a bunch of
silver pellets."

* THE TAMBORA CATASTROPHE (3): The direct effects of a volcanic eruption,
no matter how powerful, are not a threat to the world outside the eruption's
footprint -- but as with the Tambora eruption, it will still make itself felt
everywhere. A Tambora-like eruption would be much more troublesome now,
since there's more it can make trouble for.

All disasters now reverberate more than they would once have done. Disrupted
supply chains meant the effects from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in
2011 echoed elsewhere, while tourism meant many more Swedes died in the
Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 than in any recent disaster on their home soil.
As Eyjafjallajokull in Iceland showed in 2010 -- as discussed
here
at the time -- even a small eruption's ash cloud can have a big impact on air
traffic, if the eruption is in an inconvenient place, while a really big
eruption would profoundly disrupt the airlanes. That has knock-on effects of
its own: the disruption of shipments of flowers to Europe imposed serious
economic pain on Kenyan flower growers and their employees.

There would also be damage to the ozone layer, since the reactions by which
chlorine destroys ozone are promoted by the sulphate particles produced by
volcanoes. Pinatubo saw global reductions in stratospheric ozone levels, and
a considerable enhancement of the "ozone hole" over Antarctica. If a
Tambora-scale eruption were to happen in the near future, it would have even
bigger consequences.

That leads back to climate effects. Models show that if an eruption takes
place near the equator -- as with Tambora and Pinatubo -- then in the
following year, there would be an average cooling of about two degrees
Celsius over much of America, Europe, Asia and Africa; and decreased
precipitation over the Amazon, southern Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and
China. In the course of the intervening winter, the particles that cool the
surface would warm the stratosphere. That would alter the Arctic jet stream,
resulting in an unusually warm winter in America's prairies, western Europe
and Central Asia, and a very cold one in eastern Canada, the Middle East, and
southern China.

What would that mean for global agriculture? While the Tambora example might
suggest a major eruption would be serious bad news for farming, the world has
changed greatly since the time of Tambora -- one change being the
globalization of large-scale agriculture, which means that bad harvests in
some places may be offset by bumper crops elsewhere. Models and studies of
the effects of the Pinatubo eruption suggest that the world's plant life as a
whole gets more productive in the cooler, drier years that follow eruptions.
It is also possible that some parts of a world stressed by global warming
might welcome sudden cooling, if not increased dryness.

Another cause for measured optimism is that the world will see the eruption
coming, and hopefully take precautions to deal with the effects. The Red
Cross / Red Crescent Climate Center is dedicated both to providing warnings
about the human impacts of climate shifts and extreme weather, and to acting
as an advocate for the people who suffer from them most. The center works to
identify possible impacts, get warnings out, and offer advice on how to cope.
Its head, Maarten van Alst, says he thinks that the climate impacts of a
contemporary Tambora might be along the lines of the big El Nino of 1997:98,
which led to losses estimated at $36 billion USD, with 130 million lives
affected, and 21,000 lives lost. Center leadership is working to set up a
program that would investigate what actions should be given priority in that
lull between the eruption and the cooling that would follow.

What complicates any analysis is that an eruption doesn't have to be big to
cause noticeable climate effects. Eruptions that take place well away from
the equator cool only their own hemisphere; these lopsided coolings have an
impact on the "inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ)" -- a belt of rain
around the equator. When the northern hemisphere cools, the ITCZ shifts
south, the result being droughts in Africa's Sahel.

Of the Sahel's four worst years of drought during the 20th century, three
took place after northern-hemisphere eruptions: in the year after the Katmai
eruption in Alaska (in 1913), and the years of and after the El Chichon
eruption in Mexico (in 1982 and 1983). A repeat of the Tambora-sized blast
at Taupo in New Zealand that took place 1,800 years ago, on the other hand,
would push the ITCZ to the north and bring plenty of rain to the Sahel -- but
the Amazon would have a dry few years.

For a smallish eruption at high latitudes, the effects on the ITCZ would
likely be well more damaging than the local and regional effects. The shift
in the ITCZ from a Tambora-like eruption, in contrast, would be well less
damaging than the local and regional effects, as well as the unpredictable
knock-on effects of its global impact beyond any shift in the ITCZ.

Despite the complexity of the threats, there is still plenty of cause for
optimism that the challenges of volcanic eruptions can be met. Along with
a wider agricultural base and more foresight, the world is much better
governed than it was in 1815 -- if we complain about governance now, any
realistic consideration of what it was like two centuries ago makes it appear
a much more competent and conscientious -- and there's so many more resources
to deal with problems. There might well be a need for humanitarian
interventions in the weird-climate years that follow an eruption, but such
interventions do now happen.

Would global civilization be able to cope with a really huge eruption, one
that dwarfs the Tambora event, like the infrequent eruptions of the huge
volcanic caldera that -- as discussed here in 2008 --
defines America's Yellowstone National Park? We'd certainly be able to get
some advance warning and make preparations, but it would be a calamity that
would dwarf any other in all recorded history; maybe all of them put
together. [END OF SERIES]

* THE COLD WAR (116): The Soviets released no new information on the U-2
spyplane on 6 May -- but on 7 May, Khrushchev announced to the Supreme Soviet
with grinning satisfaction:

BEGIN QUOTE:

Comrades, I must tell you a secret ... I deliberately did not say that the
pilot was alive and in good health, and that we have parts of the airplane.
We did this intentionally, since if we had reported everything at once, the
Americans would have made up another version. [Applause and laughter from
the hall.]

... The pilot, Powers, was supposed to have killed himself by pricking
himself with a poison pin. What barbarism! ["Shame!" "Shame!"] Here
is the instrument [Khrushchev holds up photo] -- the latest achievement
of the Americans for killing their own people.

END QUOTE

In response, the White House fell into confusion, with Eisenhower allowing
the State Department to announce that Powers had not been given authorization
by the president to overfly the USSR. Few believed that; and to the extent
anyone did, it merely suggested that the president wasn't really in charge,
with the blame being conveniently shifted to underlings. On the morning of 9
May, Defense Secretary Gates called Secretary of State Herter, the
conversation being emotional, with Gates strongly and rightly objecting to
the implication that his officers were engaged in overflights of the USSR on
their own initiative. Gates all but demanded that "somebody", meaning the
resident of the Oval Office, take responsibility.

When Herter talked to Eisenhower about the conversation, the president
conceded the game was up; but the only immediate consequence was the issue of
further press releases that made half-hearted admissions, and tried to
further muddy the waters. Nobody was fooled, the US news media reacting with
justified incredulity and contempt. James Reston wrote in THE NEW YORK
TIMES:

BEGIN QUOTE:

This is a sad and perplexed capital tonight, caught in a swirl of charges of
clumsy administration, bad judgement and bad faith. It was depressed and
humiliated by the United States trying to cover up its activities in a series
of misleading official announcements.

END QUOTE

Eisenhower finally realized that his custom of indirection had disastrously
backfired, leaving his "reputation for honesty" in tatters. He toyed with
the idea of resigning, but knew he had to face the music. He briefed
Congress on the U-2 program and defended it; said the program was under his
control; then admitted he had bungled the handling of the matter. On 9 May,
the State Department released a document that stated the president had "full
knowledge" of the program, greatly distressing Khrushchev; worse, the
document did not promise to end the overflights.

The premier found himself in an impossible position, being forced to maintain
an inflexible front lest he be accused of spinelessness by Kremlin hawks. On
10 May, Khrushchev gave a presentation to a group of journalists, blasting
the "impudence" of Eisenhower in sending spyplanes over the USSR, comparing
him to petty criminals; one foreign journalist judged the premier confused.
On 11 May, Khrushchev announced that Powers would be put on trial and
commented: "You understand that if such aggressive actions continue, this
could lead to war."

That same day, Eisenhower gave a press conference, in which he defended the
surveillance overflights as a "distasteful but vital necessity", and pointed
out that he had proposed "Open Skies" in 1955 in recognition of that
necessity, to be rebuffed by the Soviets: they couldn't say they hadn't been
warned of American intent. More petulantly if still accurately, he pointed
out that the U-2 was an "unarmed non-military plane", and that the
"propaganda exploitation" of the incident reflected the Soviet "fetish for
secrecy". When asked by a reporter if the presidential trip to the USSR was
off, Eisenhower gave a most optimistic answer: "No, not at all." Another
reporter asked if the outlook for the summit conference in Paris had changed,
the president replied: "Not decisively at all, no."

What else could he have replied? Although the premier continued to publicly
blast the United States, he didn't call off the Paris summit. Khrushchev
privately expressed optimism that the summit would go well, his expectation
being that Eisenhower would clear the road for negotiations by admitting he
hadn't been responsible for the U-2 overflights, and that he would apologize
-- despite the fact that Khrushchev had not the slightest indication the
president would do either, that he had every reason not to do either.

The premier's attitude suggested his failure to understand Eisenhower, to
believe that the president's distaste for undignified belligerent public
theatrics, his inclination to seek and skillfully manipulate consensus, his
avowed fears of war, meant he was a weak leader. The reality was that
Khrushchev wasn't half the leader Eisenhower was. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* GIMMICKS & GADGETS: Smart cars are a big thing these days. German
automotive electronics giant Bosch has come up with a new spin on the idea:
the smart gas pedal.

Bosch's prototype intelligent "haptic" gas pedal provides feedback on when
to accelerate and when to brake, with fuel economy savings of up to 7% --
while improving safety. The pedal vibrates in several different ways to
communicate different messages; it can also adjust its resistance to being
pressed. It decides what to communicate based on information received from
your car's engine, its batteries, sensors around the car, the GPS, and even
the digital cloud. For example:

The pedal begins to pulse when a driver reaches an optimal shift point.
This is, of course, only of interest in those of us die-hards who believe
in the disappearing manual transmission.

The pedal vibrates when the driver exceeds recommended speed.

The pedal provides counter-pressure when the car has an opportunity to
coast, or (for hybrids) when the gasoline engine is close to having to
take over from the batteries.

The pedal vibrates sharply if the GPS (or a camera that can read road
signs) notices that a driver is approaching a bend at too high a rate of
speed, or if there's a traffic alert ahead.

Such things could be done with a display alert, but the gas pedal is much
less visually distracting, while being harder to ignore; indeed, with some
familiarity, driver response should become automatic. Bosch doesn't make
cars, so there's no saying when smart gas pedals will become available, but
the idea does have its attractions.

* In a further-out automotive idea, Goodyear Tires is re-inventing the tire
with the "Eagle-360", which is in the shape of a ball. Rotating such a tire
would seem problematic, but Goodyear envisions the Eagle-360 as
electromagnetically propelled -- basically, it's the rotor element of an
electromagnetic motor, with no contact with the chassis while in motion, the
car "levitating" on top of the tires.

Too out there? Maybe, but the idea has some clear attractions -- not only
reducing friction in the drivetrain and providing shock absorption, but
eliminating steering as we know it. Need to park? The tires just spin to
the side; the vehicle could easily turn around 360 degrees within its own
length. The Eagle-360 also takes a cue from nature in the pattern of whorls
that made up its tread, which are inspired by brain corals. In addition, the
tread pattern is adaptive: becoming softer and with a stronger grip in wet
conditions, stiffening in dry conditions? Something we'll see ten years from
now? Unlikely, but certainly worth puzzling with; even if it's not workable
in itself, it may have the seed of an idea that is workable.

* Now taking to the air ... although Amazon.com's scheme to use quadcopter
drones to deliver packages, known as "Prime Air", has earned the company some
derision, an entry from WIRED Online blogs ("Amazon's Drones May Be a
Marketing Stunt, But We Kinda Need Them" by Alex Davies, 30 November 2015)
suggests the concept is more than a gimmick.

As Amazon envisions Prime Air, the drones will weigh about 23 kilograms (50
pounds), fly under 120 meters (400 feet), and haul payloads weighting up to
about 2.3 kilograms (5 pounds). The little aircraft will use "sense and
avoid" technology -- including vehicle-to-vehicle communication, GPS, and
wi-fi -- to detect hazards in flight, as well as no-fly zones and other
alerts. The company says it's testing more than a dozen drone prototypes and
has "development centers" in the US, Israel, and the UK.

Amazon's press releases on Prime Air clearly serve a marketing function, and
there's many questions left to be answered about the scheme -- one big one
being an intro date, Amazon having remained mum on that matter. However, all
that said, Amazon has a fair case to make for Prime Air. In the next 30
years, the American population will increase by 70 million, to 390 million
people. Thanks in part to orders from Amazon, freight volume will grow 45%,
to 26 billion tonnes (29 billion tons) a year, according to a recent report
by the US Department of Transportation. Our road infrastructure is not in
the best shape, and doesn't seem likely to improve much in the foreseeable
future. Trucks, which move nearly 70% of American freight, already waste $27
billion USD a year in time and fuel while stuck in traffic.

Can Amazon's drones help? The Feds think so, with US Secretary of
Transportation Anthony Foxx telling WIRED: "The stress on our freight system
is increasing. We have to look at other ways to move." Foxx also commented
on "the potential commercial uses of drones as a reliever of the surface
transportation system." Amazon is already putting stress on a strained
transport system; it seems entirely worthwhile to investigate alternative
schemes of delivering freight. Might we not see, in a few decades, skyways
in which drones haul heavier freight from city to city, delivering it
directly to end users? It certainly seems like an interesting idea.

* TAKING THE HEAT: As discussed by an article from THE ECONOMIST ("A Hot
Survivor", 9 April 2016), coral reefs are the richest environment in the
oceans for marine wildlife, but they exist on the edge: although they thrive
in warm water, a rise in temperature of just a degree Celsius above the
average summer maximum for their region will kill them off. That makes
global warming a dangerous threat to the world's coral reefs.

However, some corals are better adapted to higher temperatures than others.
While most will die if the water temperature goes above 31 degrees Celsius
(88 degrees Fahrenheit), those in the Persian Gulf can withstand temperatures
of 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit). A new study explains why, and
offers some promise for saving the rest of the world's coral reefs.

Corals get their bright colors from tiny algae that live in their tissue in a
symbiotic relationship -- with the coral providing a home and the algae food,
produced by photosynthesis. If the temperatures get too high, the algae
depart, with the coral becoming a "bleached" white skeleton. In 2015 Joerg
Wiedenmann, a marine biologist, and his colleagues at the University of
Southampton in Britain discovered that the algae inside the Persian Gulf
corals were a different species from that commonly found in other parts of
the world, and that this species had a high degree of heat tolerance.

The discovery of this algae, named Symbiodinium thermophilum, raised a
number of questions. The Persian Gulf is only about 15,000 years old,
no time at all by geological standards; did the algae evolve there, or
migrate in from some other locale? To investigate, Wiedenmann and his
colleagues collected samples from 23 reefs within the Persian Gulf; the
adjacent Gulf of Oman; and the Red Sea, which is at nearly the same latitude
as the Persian Gulf, but geographically isolated from it.

They screened the samples for the genetic markers of S. thermophilum and
found, not surprisingly, that it was the most common algae in the Persian
Gulf. However, it was not confined there, being also found in the Gulf of
Oman and the Red Sea, if in much smaller numbers. A closer investigation
showed all the samples from the Persian Gulf were genetically very similar,
those from the Gulf of Oman and the Red Sea were clearly different.

In other words, it seemed as though the strains of S. thermophilum in the
Persian Gulf evolved there -- Wiedenmann judging that the intense heat of the
gulf has provided strong selection pressures for the emergence of
heat-tolerant algae. The exact genetic mechanisms by which S.
thermophilum acquired its heat tolerance remain to be identified.
Wiedenmann suggests that introducing heat-tolerance algae to coral reefs
under threat elsewhere might improve their chances for survival. This sort
of ecosystem tinkering has a discouraging history -- but it becomes a choice
of reefs surviving or becoming bleached skeletons, the pressure to tinker may
become irresistible.

* PROCEED WITH CAUTION: The controversy over genetically-modified (GM)
crops has been ironic, since all validated studies show there is no reason to
see GM crops as any more or less unsafe than crops developed by more
traditional methods. As discussed by an article from AAAS SCIENCE NOW Online
("Once Again, US Expert Panel Says Genetically Engineered Crops are Safe To
Eat" by Kelly Servick, 17 May 2016), a report released in mid-May --
sponsored by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, & Medicine --
again confirmed GM crops pose no particular threat to health.

The study on which the paper was based began in 2014, when a group of 20
scientists began hashing out a consensus on the risks and benefits of GM
crops. Since the beginning of the study, the furor over GM has roared on --
while, more quietly, GM crop development has been greatly accelerated by the
gene-editing technique known as "CRISPR", which has made GM much easier and
more powerful. The new wave of GM crops has left regulators in both the USA
and the European Union struggling with how to assess their safety.

The report tackled the list of issues at the core of the argument over GM:

Are these plants safe to eat?

How do they affect the environment?

Do they drive herbicide resistance in weeds or pesticide resistance in
insects?

More significantly, the report discussed the conundrum for Federal
agencies: what to do with gene-edited plants that won't always fit the,
almost inevitably muddled, technical definition of a regulated GM crop.

The authors assessed hundreds of research papers to obtain general
conclusions about GM crops now in commercial use:

First, there is "reasonable evidence that animals were not harmed by
eating food derived from GE crops", while epidemiological data shows no
increase in cancer or any other health problems from ingestion of these
crops.

Second, pest-resistant crops that poison insects using a gene from the
soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) generally allow farmers to
use less pesticide. Farmers can manage the risk of those pests evolving
resistance by using crops with high enough levels of the toxin and
planting non-Bt "refuges" nearby. Crops designed to be resistant to the
herbicide glyphosate, meanwhile, can lead to heavy reliance on the
chemical, and spawn resistant weeds that "present a major agronomic
problem." The panel urges more research on strategies to delay weed
resistance.

Few researchers found these conclusions a surprise, though few think the
report will make much of a dent in the public's widespread suspicion of GM.

The report addressed regulation in the final chapter. As discussed in the
"Natural Foods" series run
here
earlier this year, many countries -- including the United States, whose
framework for reviewing new biotechnology products was drafted in 1986 --
didn't, couldn't, envision modern technologies when they legally defined
genetic modification. The first generation of GM crops used a bacterium to
ferry genes from one organism into another. That was a brute-force approach;
in the 21st century, CRISPR can knock out or precisely edit DNA sequences
without leaving behind any foreign DNA. Only weeks before the release of the
report, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) judged two CRISPR-edited
crops -- a mushroom that resists browning and a high-yield variety of waxy
corn -- to be exempt from its review process because neither contained
genetic material from species considered to be "plant pests".

Critics of the USDA argue that small genetic changes can still have big
effects on the characteristics of a plant, and that gene-edited crops are not
as safe as claimed, the safety testing being slipshod or "cooked". The
issue of genetic change relative to products labeled "GM" is a red herring;
forced mutation, a traditional and widespread means of producing new crop
varieties -- (somehow) not regarded as "GM" by regulators anywhere -- results
in a wide range of not-necessarily-predictable genetic changes in a target
plant. The precision of CRISPR limits environmental and health risks by
making fewer unintended tweaks to a plant's genome.

As far as the validity of the safety testing goes, the only real issue is
that the focus on GM as an evaluation criteria is misguided. Like several
National Academies reviews before it, the new study derided regulatory
approaches that classify products based on the technology used to create
them. Nobody says GM crops should be given a free pass; the real issue is
that all new crop plants pose the same level of potential hazard, no matter
how they were developed.

Fred Gould -- an applied evolutionary biologist at North Carolina State
University in Raleigh, and chair of the group that produced the new report --
commented: "The National Academy has been saying since 1987 that it should
be the product, not the process. But the problem up until now is ... how do
you decide which products need more examination than others?"

The report suggested that regulators should ask for a full analysis of a
plant's composition -- using tools such as genome sequencing, along with
analysis of the proteins and small molecules in a sample -- to determine when
a full safety review is necessary. The approach seems reasonable to others,
but there are questions about the criteria that would be used to implement
it. Gould replied that deciding exactly which kinds of genetic or metabolic
changes represent a risk will be left to regulatory agencies, saying: "We
just give principles. We're not in the trenches with them."

The regulators haven't been left entirely to their own devices, however. In
the wake of the report, the National Academies just launched yet another
study, due out by the end of 2016, to predict the next decade of
biotechnology products and describe the scientific tools needed to regulate
them. The bottom is clear: despite public doubts, GM is coming, there's no
stopping it. We're going to have to figure out better ways to deal with it
than denial.

* THE TAMBORA CATASTROPHE (2): Climatologists don't believe the 1815
eruption of Tambora was entirely responsible for the consequent fit of
cooling. There had been another large eruption six years before -- nobody is
sure where, its signature only being known from sulfur in ice cores taken
from Greenland and Antarctica. The eruption was bigger than Pinatubo, not as
big as Tambora, but such temperature records as are available hints there was
some cooling from 1809.

A British geologist named Euan Nisbet says that Jane Austen's novel EMMA
suggests a late spring in 1814, with apple trees not blossoming until June.
There are suspicions among geologists that a series of eruptions might create
a climate downturn that lasts longer than models predict. This line of
thinking hints that a series of eruptions in the late 13th century may have
resulted in the extended period of cooling known as the "Little Ice Age".

In addition, human activities aggravated the impact of the cooling. Europe
had been in turmoil from revolution and the Napoleanic Wars for decades,
making European societies more vulnerable to environmental stress. Yunnan
would not have suffered so terribly had the Qing dynasty not worked to expand
the population there through settlement. The cooling may have been one of
the blows that gradually led to the collapse of Imperial China.

Another interesting question about the Tambora eruption is the longer-term
effect. In America, the spike in grain prices caused by European crop
failures drove a wave of farmers across the Appalachians to where the Ohio
Valley was enjoying far more pleasant weather, with barges taking exports for
Europe down the Mississippi in ever larger amounts. The collapse in the
grain price when Europe's harvest recovered contributed to the American
economy's first major depression. In Europe, the effect of the bad weather,
following the disruptions of the Napoleonic Wars, led to a period of
authoritarian rule that lasted until mid-century.

The more interesting question is: what happens if a Tambora-class eruption
happens again? On the short term of decades, volcanic eruptions don't count
for much; the insurance industry pays far less attention to them than to
storms, floods, or earthquakes. Thinking in terms of centuries, however,
volcanoes become more frightening; even a small eruption, if it occurred
in a built-up area, could inflict a tremendous amount of damage.

One study suggests that an eruption of Italy's Vesuvius one the scale of the
one that took place in 1631 -- a much smaller event than that which destroyed
Pompeii in 79 CE -- could cause losses of over $22 billion USD. Most of the
property damage would be from to buildings collapsing under the weight of the
ash that falls on them. The 1707 eruption of Mount Fuji produced only 2% as
much ash as Tambora did, but if either of the two eruptions were re-played
today, the Fuji eruption would be more destructive to Japan, since it would
produce heavy ashfall on Tokyo and its surroundings. There's just that much
more to damage today.

One of the other disturbing aspects of eruptions, hinted at above, is that
they vary so greatly in scale. One high-power hurricane is roughly like
another; to the extent that some are stronger than others in their class,
it's not by an order of magnitude. As the time scale with volcanic eruptions
is extended, in contrast, ever-bigger eruptions show up.

In terms of direct effects, that's still not too worrying for most of the
world's population; only about one out of eight people on Earth live within
the footprint of a major eruption, and of course it's unlikely to have two
major eruptions simultaneously. A "Global Assessment Report (GAR)" prepared
for the UN summit on disaster-risk reduction held in Sendai, Japan, in March
2015 found that 95% of those at risk live in just seven countries. Five --
including Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan, Mexico, and Guatemala -- are on
the Pacific "ring of fire", where clashing tectonic plates give rise to
volcanism and earthquakes; the other two are Ethiopia and Italy. Two-thirds
of the exposed population is in Indonesia.

One good thing about volcanic eruptions that they usually give plenty of
warning, and scientists have learned to recognize and assess the warning
signs. Most volcanoes that are close to large populations of people are
carefully monitored, though with some exceptions. Countries where volcanic
eruptions occur also generally have reaction plans. During the 2010
eruptions of Mount Merapi in Indonesia, the largest so far in the 21st
century, 350,000 people were evacuated, reducing the death toll to a few
hundred. Evacuations also limited the deaths from the Pinatubo eruption.

Predicting really big eruptions does seem to be harder than predicting small
ones. Before a very large eruption, the volcano has been dormant for
centuries, the internal forces taking time to build up. However, the first
eruption of a long-dormant volcano isn't necessarily catastrophic; it may go
through decades of "throat clearing" before it really blows its top. Then
again, it might just go back to sleep. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* THE COLD WAR (115): The Soviets having shot down a CIA U-2 and
captured its pilot, Nikita Khrushchev was now confronted with a choice:
shrug off the incident and proceed with negotiations with the US, or make a
crisis out of it. He might have shrugged it off; after all, there were
Soviet spies in Western prisons, and their capture hadn't provoked a crisis
in East-West relations. Besides, the Soviets were working on spy satellites
to overfly the USA, and they had put paid to the U-2 overflights in a very
emphatic way. He also had reasons to make a crisis of it, to demonstrate
that he wasn't a weakling, that he wasn't soft on defense of the Motherland,
that he was still a leader of the Red cause in the confrontation with the
capitalist world -- defying the snipings of the Chinese.

Khrushchev at heart was impulsive, driven by insecurities. He decided to
play it up to the hilt. There's no way of knowing what would have happened
had he simply shrugged the matter off; all that can be said for a fact was
that he chose the path of confrontation. To that end, he decided to give the
Americans more rope, saying nothing about the incident for the moment.

That afternoon, 1 May, General Goodpaster phoned Eisenhower to tell him:
"One of our reconnaissance planes ... is overdue, and possibly lost." That
was disturbing, but not too worrisome; there could well be some
straightforward reason why the aircraft had disappeared, and in any case, the
CIA had reassured the president that the aircraft had a self-destruct system,
that the pilot was unlikely to survive a bailout from such altitudes, that
even if the Soviets recovered debris, it wouldn't tell them anything.

However, Eisenhower wasn't naive, and he knew the CIA had overstated its case
in the past -- how could he have failed to wonder from what experience, what
testing, did agency officials know what was going to happen under such
circumstances that they could say so with such confidence? Nonetheless, for
the moment the president was not assuming the worst. The next day, 2 May,
Goodpaster told the president that the aircraft had certainly disappeared.
There was nothing that Eisenhower could do but wait for comment by the
Soviets -- and since they hadn't raised a fuss about the matter, he saw no
reason to do anything himself.

On 5 May Jim Hagerty, the president's press secretary, interrupted a meeting
to tell Eisenhower of a report that earlier in the day, Premier Khrushchev
had delivered an angry speech to the Supreme Soviet, declaring that Soviet
air defenses had shot down an American spy plane. Khrushchev called the
intrusion an "aggressive provocation", suggesting that it was performed
by "Pentagon militarists", without Eisenhower's knowledge.

Eisenhower was not at all happy at the suggestion he wasn't really in
control, a charge often leveled at him by domestic critics; it hinted that
Khrushchev judged him a weak leader. In any case, now it was Eisenhower's
turn to make a decision: either he could go public and take full
responsibility, or he could go quiet and hope the problem went away. If the
game was really up, going public was the only real option. After all, the
U-2 was no longer a secret to the Kremlin, it hadn't been one to America's
allies; the only people who weren't in on the secret were American citizens.

Besides, was it really so embarrassing? The Soviets energetically spied on
the West, Red spies had been regularly arrested since the end of the war --
and Khrushchev's violent blustering had given Eisenhower every fair
reason to find out what Soviet capabilities really were. Only a minority of
American citizens would have had a problem with it.

Then again, possibly Khrushchev had just been venting steam, and would now go
quiet. If Eisenhower spoke up, wasn't it likely he would just add fuel to
the fire? He decided to keep quiet. The afternoon of that same day, 5 May,
the president approved a statement to be released to the news media, saying
that a NASA U-2 weather research aircraft flying over Turkey had gone missing
on 1 May -- the implication being that it had strayed over Soviet airspace.
From this mis-step, others would follow. [TO BE CONTINUED]

* SCIENCE NOTES: According to a recent analysis in the journal NATURE
CLIMATE CHANGE, given the assumption, generally agreed-upon in the science
community, that sea levels will rise two meters or more by the end of the
century, the result could be the dislocation of 13 million or more Americans
-- a much larger number than previously assumed. Mathew E. Hauer -- one of
the study's authors and a doctoral student in geography at the University of
Georgia -- commented: "We could see a huge-scale migration if we don't
deploy any protection against sea level rise."

The authors of the paper combined future population estimates with predicted
sea-level rise, using data from the National Oceanic & Atmospheric
Administration, to show that millions are at risk: 4.2 million if seas rise
by a meter; 13.1 million with a two-meter increase, with the numbers
obviously continuing to grow with greater increases. Of the US population at
risk, nearly 50% will be in Florida, and an additional 20% in other parts of
the Southeastern United States.

None of the 22 coastal states in the continental United States, as well as
Washington DC, will be immune from the effects of sea-level rise. If the
seas were to rise by about two meters by 2100, more than a million people in
California, and almost as many in New York and New Jersey, would be affected.
The paper estimated the cost of relocating the 13.1 million people displaced
by sea-level rise would be about $14 trillion USD, based on relocation
estimates for residents of Alaskan coastal villages. The political
implications of resettlement would likely inflate that sum considerably.

Skeptics have suggested the paper has overstated the number of people at
risk by projecting current population growth in coastal areas into the
future, when it is likely to fall off in the face of the risk factors in
settling in coastal regions.

* As discussed by a note from AAAS SCIENCE, the center of our Galaxy is known
to have a high level of activity that generates high-energy radiation, but
astrophysicists have been unable to account for why the galactic core
generates so much gamma radiation. One suggestion is that interactions
between dark-matter particles -- believed to make up a large fraction of the
Galaxy's mass, though they haven't been nailed down yet -- are producing the
surplus gamma rays.

Now, two recent papers suggest that the excess could be produced by "pulsars"
-- fast-spinning neutron stars that generate a pulsing radio signal. One
reason for believing this is that the pattern of gamma-ray photons streaming
from the galactic center is clumpy instead of smooth, strongly suggesting
that individual sources of gamma rays, not a diffuse cloud of particles that
only occasionally interact, may be to blame. Two research teams -- one from
the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the other made up of
scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton
University -- used slightly different statistical methods to estimate how
many pulsars would be needed to create the pattern of gamma-ray radiation
that's been observed by an Earth-orbiting gamma-ray telescope.

Both teams came up with much the same value. In the sphere of space that
lies within about 5,000 light-years of the center of the Galaxy, a little
more than 60 such pulsars of varying size and brightness could generate about
half the excess gamma rays seen coming from that region; about 200 could
account for all of the excess radiation at those wavelengths. This theory
has a difficulty, in that neutron stars are very small and hard to spot at
such a distance. However, future observations should help confirm or deny
proposed mechanisms for the production of gamma radiation.

* In 1859, a solar outburst caused an electromagnetic storm on Earth,
resulting in auroras that were visible at low latitudes, and inducing
voltages in telegraph lines that shut down communications. The "Carrington
event" -- named after British astronomer Richard Carrington, who documented
it -- was thought to have been more powerful than any solar storm since,
carpeting the entire Earth.

As reported by AAAS SCIENCE NOW Online, researchers examining the effects of
solar storms in 2003 and 2005 now suspect the Carrington event has been
exaggerated; it was neither unusually powerful nor global. Such storms are
caused when a ball of hot, electrically-charged gas from the Sun slams into
Earth's magnetic field, temporarily weakening it, creating worldwide auroras,
and in one case taking out all the power in Sweden's third-largest city.
Both recent storms weakened the Earth's magnetic field after just minutes,
according to solar readings from satellites and magnetic strength readings
from ground sensors. It would have taken more than an hour for such space
storms to demonstrate effects everywhere on Earth.

The pattern of changes in magnetic field strength over 48 hours seen in these
two events were very similar to those recorded by a ground instrument during
the Carrington event -- suggesting the event was no more powerful and no more
widespread. This tends to lower the threat level of solar storms against
satellites, communications, and power grids; but the threat remains, with
such storms being readily able to inflict local damage.

* ANOTHER MONTH: WIRED Online blogs conducted an interview with Manu
Saadia, whose new book: TREKONOMICS: THE ECONOMICS OF STAR TREK -- is
making something of a splash, even being praised by professional economists.

STAR TREK was never noted for being very imaginative -- but somehow, it seems
without trying, the series postulated a breath-taking radical vision of the
society of the future. What happens when automation has made goods so cheap
that nobody needs money any more? If a people want something, it's theirs
for the taking.

Saadia said in the interview: "It's made clear and emphasized several times
in the course of the show that the Federation does not have money. You have
Captain Picard saying: 'We've overcome hunger and greed, and we're no longer
interested in the accumulation of things.'"

Saadia believes the seed of the STAR TREK universe was planted by Isaac
Asimov:

BEGIN QUOTE:

In 1941, [Asimov] publishes his first story about robots, and his great idea
and insight is that the robots are not going to be our enemies or our doom as
a society, the way robots were usually portrayed, as Frankensteins. The
robots will liberate us, and so Asimov is trying to figure out a world where
human labor is no longer necessary for survival.

And that is something you see throughout STAR TREK, much more so in THE NEXT
GENERATION than in the original series. In THE NEXT GENERATION, you have
these incredible machines that will make anything for you on the spot and on
demand -- the replicators ... a metaphor for universal automation the way it
is described in Asimov's robot stories.

END QUOTE

Of course, the STAR TREK holodecks allow people to have effectively any
experience they want; they could climb mountains, build their own theme park,
or visit anywhere in the Galaxy. Really, could anyone want more?

BEGIN QUOTE:

Imagine yourself growing up in a society where there is never any want or
need or financial insecurity of any sort. You will be a very different
person. You will be absolutely uninterested in conspicuous consumption.

... You will probably be interested in things of a higher nature -- the
cultivation of the mind, education, love, art, and discovery. And so these
people are very stoic in that sense, because they have no worldly interests
that we today could relate to.

... I usually say that they're all aliens, in a way. My friend Chris
[Black], who wrote on the show, said it was really hard for the writers,
because it's a workplace drama, but there's no drama.

END QUOTE

Material wealth having become almost meaningless, in the Federation status is
determined by achievement: "What really makes sense in the STAR TREK
universe and STAR TREK society is to compete for reputation. What is not
abundant in STAR TREK's universe is the captain's chair."

Saadia sees a particular irony between the Federation and the Borg, the
hive-mind race of cyborgs:

BEGIN QUOTE:

The Borg are such great villains because they're so similar to the
Federation, when you think about it. The Borg have perfect allocation of
goods, and supply and demand, and everybody is connected to everybody in the
beehive, and they just seem to be extremely efficient.

They're also the other society in STAR TREK that could be characterized as
"post-scarcity". Any Borg drone never wants or needs anything, it's always
provided by the Collective. So it is the mirror image ... of what a society
that is both redistributive and satiated could look like. It's almost as if
the writers tried to incorporate the criticism of the society they propose.

END QUOTE

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